PAREIDOLIA: The role of images

Pareidolia

We tend to try and give meaning to everything we see, including images. We simply have to raise our heads to get a glimpse of a face or the silhouette of a rabbit in a group of clouds. This is called pareidolia (see Principle)!

Our Pareidolia tool is a collection of pareidolia images that you can download and use for free, in order to discuss images, how to read and interpret them, and the importance of acknowledging

subjectivity.

What I see is not necessarily what the other person is seeing!

What we see depends on the images, its frame (what it shows and what it leaves out), its definition, if it was altered etc. But it also depends on our passed experiences and education, which influence what we are sensitive to or not. This is why it is always important to confront our point of view with other people's.

Internet is full of images. Photos, videos, gifs and memes occupy a significant amount of space on our screens ! Everyday, it is estimated that 2 billion images are uploaded. It is so normal and ordinary to stumble accross them, but does that mean that we are able to understand, read and interpret them correctly?

Photo BY Mathieu Rivrin

The PAREIDOLIA tool was designed to question our relationship to images and how easy it is to press "Share" on social media. By asking "What about you? What do you think you are seeing?" Pareidolia images invite users to call upon their skills and knowledge to describe and debate their perceptions (see How to use).

On internet and social media, young people and adults do not simply look at images. They are not passive consumers but actively contribute to co-host and moderate digital spaces with others, when they take pictures and upload them, by commenting others' posts, etc. These interactions oftentimes happen "naturally", "without thinking" and thus, without thinking of potentially negative consequences.

Digital literacy is crucial at all ages! Not only does it allow users to navigate safely online, but it can help them become better communicators, better thinkers and better online citizens.

Pareidolia as a perception bias can be used in all sorts of pedagogical contexts, whether during collective activities or most intimist, formal and informal settings, to raise awareness to children, teenagers and young adults, on the importance of subjective interpretations of images.

Examples
of how to use

Divide the classroom or workshop in duos. Show the images from the collection or print them and distribute them around. Ask participants to look at the image and write or to keep in mind what they think they are seeing.

Ask participants to look at the image again. But this time, they have to debate with their paired students on how they have seen and justify their point.

Take a moment to define pareidolia and the role of images in how false information are spread around (see the Boomering MOOC).

Why stop there? If participants have access to a smartphone, suggest to go outside and seek out objects with ambiguous shapes that could work as pareidolia. Define criteria they have to abide by (a specific zone, a specific frame rate, etc) and ask them to take pictures of what they have found and to present their work to the rest of the group.

Is this drawing a rabbit or a duck? It is known as the "duck-rabbit" drawing first published in the German magazin Fliegende Blätter in 1982, in a comedic article titled "Which animals look the most like each other?"

Today, this drawing in Philosophy classes to talk about how human perceive the world and subjectivity.

More ideas

Online

Share the PAREIDOLIA collection to your friends on social media

and start discussing what you see in the comments

At home

Share pareidolia images between family members and/or look for pareidolia and ambiguous shapes directly at home together

Outside

Look for ambiguously shaped objects in the wild, photograph them and share them online to initiate conversations

In the classroom

Host create and dynamic workshops to initiate students in critically reading and assessing images

The non-profit and social cooperative Glocal Factory is based in Verona and Florence in Italie. This organisation was responsible of the development of the Pareidolia tool.

All partner organisations contributed to creating the collection, by looking for free-to-use photographs and by donating original creations. Images had to fit a certain number of criteria defined by partners: no alterations, free-to-use, not showing human individuals in humiliating settings or contain inappropriate elements to minors, encouraging hate speech towards an individual or a group. We wanted to ensure the tool is fun and accessible to use at all ages of life.

Coordination

Cristina Demartis - European projects manager

Maria Carla Italia - Political scientists, specialised in communication

Technical adviser

Philippe Le Gonnidec - Multimedia expert, CEO Politique Numérique

The word pareidolia comes from the greek pará (παρά) and eídōlon (εἴδωλον) which put together mean "put an image in the place of another". This concept is fascinating!

Even though it was considered a symptom of psychosis, pareidolia is absolutely normal. It refers to the natural tendency of the human mind to project familiar shapes onto random objects.

Have you already thought you saw a rabbit in the clouds ? Or two eyes and a smile in a coffee stain? That is visual pareidolia.

Pareidolia can also be in sounds when for example, we think we recognise words from our own language in a conversation held in a language we absolutely do not speak.

It is an illusion of sorts, but the difference is that it is our own brain that plays around! Our brain thinks he is seeing things, especially familiar shapes that are not here in the first place. There are several explanations to pareidolia. We may be trying to find reassurance, to give meaning to an inexplicable event, or to simply have fun. What we see depends on our senses and passed experiences.

This is why it is important to take a step back and reflect on what we think we are seeing and on subjectivity.

Did you know?

Pareidolia was at first considered a symptom of psychosis. Psychiatrist Karl Ludwing Kahlbaum first popularised the term in 1866, la paréidolie était considérée comme un symptôme d’une maladie mentale, la “psychose”. C’est en effet le psychiatre allemand Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum qui a popularisé le terme en Allemand en 1866 auprès de la communauté médicale en publiant l'article "Sur le délire des sens" (Die Sinnesdelieren). Un an plus tard, le Journal of Mental Science traduit cet article et définit le terme pareidolia en Anglais comme synonyme de "hallucination changeante, (...) partielle" et "percepion d'images secondaires".

Aujourd’hui, la paréidolie est reconnue comme tout à fait normale. Nous en avons même

doté nos ordinateurs et webcams ! Le petit carré orange qui encadre ton visage lorsque

l'on prend un selfie est un des héritages informatiques de la paréidolie. Il s'agit de la reconnaissance faciale, et elle suscite de nombreux débats de nature éthique.

Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum, photograph taken before his passing in 1899 by an unknown photographer, Wikipedia Commons

VEronA

From the 22nd to the 24th of September, 2021, project partners went to Verona, second most inhabited city of the Veneto region after Venice. After a little detour to admire the ruins of its amphitheater and the little courtyard that inspired W. Shakespeare his famous Romeo and Juliet, we went to work during the first transnational meeting since the beginning of the project.